An echo state network with improved topology (IESN) is proposed for accurate and efficient time series prediction. In this approach, a tighter bound of the echo state property related to the Lipshitz constant of reservoir activation function and the maximum structured singular value of reservoir is firstly researched to run the model at the edge of chaos. A smooth composite reservoir activation function is then designed to enhance the ESN. The exact echo state property bound is solved by computing the Lipshitz constant of the composite function. Finally, a decoupling matrix with eigenvalues distributing uniformly in the complex plane is built as the reservoir for abundant dynamic characteristics. Six classical benchmarks are employed to test the IESN. Besides, combined with amplitude-frequency separation based on the Hilbert transform, the IESN predicts a set of engine vibration signals in knock. Compared with several popular models, the proposed IESN shows the best performance.

Fault diagnosis can improve the safety and reliability of diesel engines. An end-to-end method based on a multi-attention convolutional neural network (MACNN) is proposed for accurate and efficient diesel engine fault diagnosis. By optimizing the arrangement and kernel size of the channel and spatial attention modules, the feature extraction capability is improved, and an improved convolutional block attention module (ICBAM) is obtained. Vibration signal features are acquired using a feature extraction model alternating between the convolutional neural network (CNN) and ICBAM. The feature map is recombined to reconstruct the sequence order information. Next, the self-attention mechanism (SAM) is applied to learn the recombined sequence features directly. A Swish activation function is introduced to solve “Dead ReLU” and improve the accuracy. A dynamic learning rate curve is designed to improve the convergence ability of the model. The diesel engine fault simulation experiment is carried out to simulate three kinds of fault types (abnormal valve clearance, abnormal rail pressure, and insufficient fuel supply), and each kind of fault varies in different degrees. The comparison results show that the accuracy of MACNN on the eight-class fault dataset at different speeds is more than 97%. The testing time of the MACNN is much less than the machine running time (for one work cycle). Therefore, the proposed end-to-end fault diagnosis method has a good application prospect.

Accurate and timely fault diagnosis for the diesel engine is crucial to guarantee it works safely and reliably, and reduces the maintenance costs. A novel diagnosis method based on variational mode decomposition (VMD) and kernel-based fuzzy c-means clustering (KFCM) is proposed in this paper. Firstly, the VMD algorithm is optimized to select the most suitable K value adaptively. Then KFCM is employed to classify the feature parameters of intrinsic mode functions (IMFs). Through the comparison of many different parameters, the singular value is selected finally because of the good classification effect. In this paper, the diesel engine fault simulation experiment was carried out to simulate various faults including valve clearance fault, fuel supply fault and common rail pressure fault. Each kind of machine fault varies in different degrees. To prove the effectiveness of VMD-KFCM, the proposed method is compared with empirical mode decomposition (EMD)-KFCM, ensemble empirical mode decomposition (EEMD)-KFCM, VMD-back propagation neural network (BPNN), and VMD-deep belief network (DBN). Results show that VMD-KFCM has advantages in accuracy, simplicity, and efficiency. Therefore, the method proposed in this paper can be used for diesel engine fault diagnosis, and has good application prospects.

Engine fault detection is critical to enhancing the reliability of modern equipment. However, it is challenging to obtain a large number of high-quality labeled data for engines, which is not conducive to improving the training accuracy of deep learning methods. Therefore, this article proposes a fault detection method combining adaptive recursive variational mode decomposition (ARVMD) and component energy distribution spectrum (CEDS). The article first introduces recursive mode into VMD. Then, the mode number is dynamically selected according to the energy distribution of the power spectral density (PSD) to extract the intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) continuously. The quadratic penalty term is optimized correspondingly using SNR. The decomposition results of artificial and real signals demonstrated that ARVMD has higher SNR and efficiency than VMD. Next, the center frequency and unit bandwidth energy of IMF are used to construct CEDS. Fault diagnosis is realized by the CEDS correlation ranking of various faults. Finally, two case studies are performed to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The results show that the proposed ARVMD-CEDS method provides an efficient and effective solution for single-channel engine fault diagnosis.

Fault feature extraction has a positive effect on accurate diagnosis of diesel engine. Currently, studies of fault feature extraction have focused on the time domain or the frequency domain of signals. However, early fault signals are mostly weak energy signals, and time domain or frequency domain features will be overwhelmed by strong background noise. In order consistent features to be extracted that accurately represent the state of the engine, bispectrum estimation is used to analyze the nonlinearity, non-Gaussianity and quadratic phase coupling (QPC) information of the engine vibration signals under different conditions. Digital image processing and fractal theory is used to extract the fractal features of the bispectrum pictures. The outcomes demonstrate that the diesel engine vibration signal bispectrum under different working conditions shows an obvious differences and the most complicated bispectrum is in the normal state. The fractal dimension of various invalid signs is novel and diverse fractal parameters were utilized to separate and characterize them. The value of the fractal dimension is consistent with the non-Gaussian intensity of the signal, so it can be used as an eigenvalue of fault diagnosis, and also be used as a non-Gaussian signal strength indicator. Consequently, a symptomatic approach in view of the hypothetical outcome is inferred and checked by the examination of vibration signals from the diesel motor. The proposed research provides the basis for on-line monitoring and diagnosis of valve train faults.